James K. Baxter died of a heart attack on 22 October 1972 in the Auckland suburb of Glenfield. It was an unlikely, though not unfitting, location for the prophet against normality to quit the ordinary world that he had so imaginatively created and biblically lambasted. He had been driven to a doctor in one of those suburbs thrown up by postwar affluence, later collapsing on the doorstep. He sought help at a nearby house and died there among the suburbanites he had condemned for the spiritual emptiness of their materially comfortable lives.

Looking back on Baxter's legacy a decade later, the maverick young Auckland poet, Leigh Davis, who committed the Baxterian sin of taking a university degree and made it mortal by choosing a career in finance, playfully claimed that his generation's distance from Baxter's was one of marketing and outward presentation:

But, of course, Baxter's presence in our literary and cultural memory involves more than his theatrical adoption of a mendicant style of dress. Over the two decades covered in this chapter, although his literary aura inevitably dimmed and flickered, he remained inescapable, as Fleur Adcock implied he would in her ‘In Memoriam: James K. Baxter’ (1974). Here, she gives her friend and near-contemporary a send-off that, while witty and sometimes irreverent, nevertheless finds its way to the correct elegiac conclusion: